Paradiso (1966 novel)

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Paradiso was the only novel by Cuban poet José Lezama Lima to be completed published during his lifetime. The narrative consists of the childhood and youth of José Cemí, told in a highly baroque experimental style, and depicts many scenes which have remarkable resonances with Lezama's own life as a young poet in Havana. Many of the characters reappear in Lezama's posthumous novel Oppiano Licario, published in Mexico in 1977.

In the novel, José Cemí struggles with his mysterious illness, the death of his father, and his developing homosexuality and poetic sensibilities. He lives in the world of pre-Castro Havana, and the Cuban Revolution only appears as a secondary plot. Because of the graphically homosexual scenes and its ambivalence towards the political situation of the day, Paradiso encountered controversy and publication problems. Today it is widely read in the Spanish-speaking world but has not achieved the same fame in English-speaking countries despite an excellent translation by Gregory Rabassa.

Despite having written one of the most accomplished novels in Cuba's history, Lezama has said that he has never considered himself a novelist, but rather a poet who wrote a poem that became a novel. Paradiso can thus be considered a kind of long poem, just as well as a neo-baroque novel.

[edit] References

Interrogando a Lezama Lima. Recopilación de textos sobre José Lezama Lima. Ed. Pedro Simon Martinez. La Habana: Ediciones Casa de las Américas: 1970.